By David Futrelle
See correction at end of post.
The neo-Nazi internet tip sheet The Daily Stormer is warning CNN employees that itstroll army will “track down” their parents, siblings, spouses and children in an act of revenge against the network for its reporting on the racist and anti-Semitic Reddit memester who made a gif depicting Donald Trump body-slamming a man with a CNN logo for a head that achieved internet infamy after Trump himself retweeted it a few days ago.
What’s pissing off the Stormers, and the all-too-familiar assortment of internet deplorables (and bots) behind the #CNNBlackmail hashtag, is that CNN, which hasn’t publicly named the memester, says that as a news organization it retains the right to publicly identify him in the future.
Yep, that’s right: a bunch of dudes who have no problem doxxing or threatening to dox people they don’t like is mad at CNN for not actually doxxing someone. And neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev, seems to be the angriest of the bunch, his fury initially driven in part by false reports that the memester was 15 years old. (He is in fact an adult.) And so in a post on the Daily Stormer he rallied the troops for what he sees as a righteous campaign to force CNN “to taste their own medicine.” Although it isn’t the “same medicine” at all.
After presenting CNN with a list of ridiculous demands that no real news organization would ever meet — including firing all the journalists vaguely connected to the CNN story and setting up a $50,000 college scholarship for the racist memester — weev declares
If you do not do this, we are going to be tracking you down just like you tracked him down.
You are fake news, and we are the real media. As journalists, we have the right to track people down and seek comment on your criminal associations. We now have jackboots on the ground in every major metro area in the world.
We are going to track down your parents.
We are going to track down your siblings.
We are going to track down your spouses.
We are going to track down your children. Because hey, that’s what you guys get to do, right? We’re going to see how you like it when our reporters are hunting down your children.We are going to seek comment from them all, because you are fake news terrorists engaged in a seditious plot to undermine our President and the 63 million people who voted for him. HanAssholeSolo was a private citizen, but none of you are. We are going to see you brought to account for this, because that’s what real media does: expose criminals.
The difference being that when real real reporters “seek comment” from someone, they literally seek comment from them. When Stormers and their alt-right pals “seek comment” from people it usually means the targets of their “questioning” get sent a lot of death threats and oven memes, an impression Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin doesn’t exactly dispel with his own post filled with an assortment of violent anti-CNN memes, including one featuring the heads of assorted CNN journalists pasted onto photos of Jews in a concentration camp and another one of CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, the author of the offending story, warning him to “sleep with one eye open.”
Weev goes on to inform
Any CNN employee that does not want to be tracked down alongside their families will have one additional week to quit CNN and denounce their act of blackmail against a private citizen. After that, it is game on.
Do you understand what is coming? This is going to be ironic punishment. You are going to have the exact thing done to you that you’ve been doing to us for ages. You have an easy chance to stop this, so don’t say that we don’t play fair, and don’t pretend you didn’t have it coming.
We didn’t make these rules – you did – and now we’re going to force you to play by them. Hope you enjoy what is coming, you filthy rat kike bastards.
Kill yourselves, kike news fakers. You deserve every single bit of what you are about to get.
Lovely.
CORRECTION: This story originally attributed a Daily Stormer post to the site’s publisher Andrew Anglin; it was actually written for the Daily Stormer by neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev. Anglin posted his own threatening post later.
Today I learned that it’s unethical to say “if you leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.”
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
Just as unethical as Nazis threatening to kill people’s kids.
@Bina Tee hee, bookmarked! It’s all publicly available information, right? Game on, shitbirds! If you don’t like it, delete your account!
It’s apparently much less dangerous for the alt-right to threaten doxxing and violence. But CNN? Oh no, they just have to accept all the threats passively, and never decide to release the threatener’s real name.
Taking CNNs decision that they might release the name if they have to to stop the threat, and ranting about it for multiple paragraphs and posts.
Taking the neonazi’s threats to multiple people, and mentioning it once.
Double standards.
mrex, what did you plan to achieve by posting this information this way? Your previous presentations have used similar rhetoric & were all poorly received.
I wonder if people like mrex understand that Trump re-tweeting that makes it an official position of the White House, and Trump?
And that it is tacitly approving of measures to “take down CNN”?
No? Of course not. Must protect the racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic asshole who DIDN’T get doxxed instead of protecting the people who actually DO get doxxed.
We know why this asshole deleted his account and apologized, right? Because his bullshit has real world repercussions, and he fucking didn’t want to suffer the bullshit he and other assholes knowingly inflict on others “for the lulz.”
And I’m getting pretty fucking tired of having to explain what doxxing actually is. I’m also tired of people like mrex spreading misinformation.
How about this, mrex? If you’re afraid of anything online being traced back to you and you and your family would be harmed by your actions, why would you act on them?
Attention, of course.
> CNN reports on someone depicting them being beaten up that someone posted on A PUBLIC FORUM. (srsly, 4Chan and Reddit aren’t your diaries, bruh. Everything you post on there can be tracked and found.)
> CNN says that they found the guy responsible, and reached out to him. He said he was sorry, deleted the posts, and vowed to not do it again, and CNN agrees to not publish his name.
> Somehow, this is considered “doxxing”, even though none of the man’s details were released.
Wut.
@JS
“Taking the neonazi’s threats to multiple people, and mentioning it once.
Double standards.”
You mean mentioning it once and using the strongest language to condemn it, rather than the wishy-washy “unethical” that I used to criticize CNNs behavior?
But Ok, I can rant over multiple paragraphs about NeoNazis/conservatives.
I’m sick of NeoNazis finding every little imperfect liberal and making false equivalencies. The left is made up of humans. Many of them suck. The conservative platform, however codifies suck right into their policies.
What these NeoNazi assholes did is inexcusable. It’s one thing to unintentionally make a implicit threat like CNN. It’s another thing to explictly threaten someone’s children.
I’m sick of watching my country become a cesspit of sexism and racism. I never in a million years thought we would mive backwards. I’m sick of the neonazis handing our asses to us in elections. I’m sick of watching conservatives march us towards authoritarianism.
I’m sick of the right’s platform. This country needs a functioning government to be successful. Right now, neither party is functional.
Well, that was an html fail. Oops.
@Oogly’s
My intention was to give background information. David hadn’t. I read CNN every day, so I had an opinion on this long before the internet Nazis caught on.
You give me far too much credit to think that I can write well enough to use rhetoric. I’m lucky enough to manage paragraphs and sentences.
@SFHC
Then ignore me. I’ve asked people to ignore me. Why don’t you?
The first or second (depending on how you count) link in the article was the background mrex thinks David didn’t give us.
Asking people to ignore you is a sign you might be trolling them somehow. Might want to reconsider the rhetoric you’re “not using”.
#CNNBlackmail is indistinguishable from a channer op. Ya wanna wring hands about the poor, poor fascist not getting doxxed, you go ahead. I’ll be busy siding my eyes at enablers of fuckery
Also, how utterly bullshit is the idea that actually doxxing him without contacting hin 1st woulda been somehow better? Same people would be just as up in arms guaranteed. Damned if they do or don’t. Yep, they’re only recourse really is meant to be ‘take it with a smile’. He got off easy, period
@mrex
But also:
You can’t be serious
Reminds me of a certain hairy incel…
Look, let’s not forget that CNN is basically a cesspool. When I was in the hospital in early April 2016, CNN was my only alternative to Faux. They were wall to wall Right-Wing flacks and spinners, with an occasional centrist Democrat allowed to get a couple of words in edgewise. As the election approached, Kellyanne Conjob practically lived on CNN, and they hired Trump thug Cory Lewangrabski as an expert commenter. The stench was enough to make a skunk retch.
Now as to hanassholesolo, I think they probably handled it the right way — the guy really should be identified as an object of scorn but on the other hand neither he nor his family should be exposed to violence. But the way they expressed their action DID sound like an implied threat of doxxing if he doesn’t behave the way they want him to. They might have been better off simply saying that he has apologized and removed his offensive material and promised not to re-offend, and that they are withholding his name out of concern that he and his family might face retaliation in view of the current political turmoil — and just not mention the possible consequences of re-offending. It did SOUND like a sort of blackmail — or it did to me. They were trying to sound like they hadn’t gone too easy on the guy, and they went a bit too far in the other direction.
It was sort of a tricky situation for an organization that wishes to be known as a news organization — if you want to grant CNN the honor of being a legitimate news organization, which I don’t. (I call it the Clickbait Nonsense Network, but you can probably come up with a better one.) They mishandled the original anti-Trump article, and that’s a really bad thing, because it gave the Trumpsterites a chance to scream “fake news!” and confirm their beliefs about the “lamestream” news. (They are still going after the Washington Post for an article that they published and then retracted when it didn’t pan out, claiming that Russia had hacked the power grid. One bad article proves that the mainstream media is corrupt, y’know.) And then their over-reaction by forcing three people to quit over the article made things worse. It confirmed the notion that this was a really bad hatchet job, not just a bit of careless reporting.
CNN has to be defended against Trump on general principles. But much as I hate to admit it, I’m taking inappropriate pleasure at seeing their discomfiture.
And by the way I totally understand where mrex is coming from. The Democratic Party has been dysfunctional, in that it was forced to compromise its traditional values in order to survive the Reagan-Gingrich onslaught and the Right-Wing Fox/Drudge/Limbaugh/Breitbart propaganda operation, and now seems very unsure of how vigorously to express its core values. One of the big problems is that working for the working class is very much in the Democrats’ DNA, but they are losing those votes because they haven’t been able to appeal to them the way the Republicans have. It seems like the white working class is more susceptible to appeals based on cultural/religious issues, not economic issues — in fact, they seem to be convinced that the “elitists” who are “shipping their jobs overseas” are Democrats. The dilemma is how to get those votes back without appealing to racial and religious antipathies.
Because annoying your dumb ass is far more entertaining. =)
Shitposting and then saying “just ignore me if you don’t like it” is the equivalent of poking your finger at someone, stopping an inch from their face and saying “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”
Yeah, one political party is at fault for the other party being completely and utterly morally corrupt, and for not stopping that party for being completely and utterly morally corrupt. Yep, it’s the Dem’s fault and they’re responsible for every goddamned shit decision that the GOP makes. /s
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen this “well, why didn’t you STOP them? It’s your fault!!” for the bloody nastiness that the GOP has become.
I know this is simplistic and not what GSJM said, but it IS what I’m reading more and more online, and I’m fucking sick of it. Extremely short memories, they haz it.
Hey, this is what the online political landscape has become. Enjoy, world.
And now: White House Warns CNN That Critical Coverage Could Cost Time Warner Its Merger
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/white-house-if-cnn-bashes-trump-trump-may-block-merger.html
GOM,
CNN is a cesspit. So what? Focusing on that and focusing on their response to Trump posting this meme derails from the real issue. That Trump has been riling up his base and sending them after journalists in an effort to intimidate the press. That’s a serious threat to democracy.
CNN kind of did bring this on themselves by enabling Trump and his antics in the first place, but I’m glad they’re not taking this lying down. Playing the oh no, they’re not the perfect victim game only sends the message that it’s okay to bully, harass and threaten as long as it’s done anonymously.
Come on, Mrex, you know we feed trolls until they burst. And you’re a troll.
A bit late but:
@Entity447B: Thanks for the info!
PeeVee: The particular thing that irritates the hell out of me is that Hillary is being condemned constantly for having run a “bad campaign,” but nobody seems to be able to explain how in hell you run a campaign against a guy who has a terrible past history, lies as often as he breathes, and makes conflicting and impossible to execute promises. Everybody says, “Well, she didn’t have any policy proposals, she was running just because it was her turn.” She had very well-developed policy proposals, but the media was too interested in her emails than her policies, and then accused her of not having them because they weren’t willing to make the effort to read and write about them.
She cleaned his clock in the debates. She gave speeches that nobody covered because they were too wonky and not incendiary like Trump’s — as if being incendiary rather than wonky is the quality you want in a President. So Democrats do at times seem to be at a loss at times. How DO you compete with an opponent who thinks that truth is something you make up on the fly to serve whatever purposes you have at the moment. The basic problem seems to be that the Republican Party is a complete shitstorm, and Democrats have been trying to compete with a legitimate opponent — as they have been accustomed to doing in the past — and just don’t know how to combat a shitstorm.
So we are in a situation where one side seems to be working to become ultimate evil, while the other side seems constantly puzzled as to how to counteract that, and yes, that is totally frustrating.
Ironic punishment….Don’t you just love it when a fucking idiot can’t use the word irony correctly in a sentence.
Andrew Anglin, a fucking pedo. Andrew spends most of his time travelling Asian countries that are known for the sexual slavery of children and are hot spots for sexual tourism. He is obsessed with young girls and thinks it’s totally healthy and normal for men over 40 to engage in sexual behavior with girls as young as 12 and 14. Esp young Asian girls. Maybe he likes children because he is the size of an average 10 year old. I can only hope for an ironic ending for him. ( I do not condone violence acted upon him but I do think an untimely ending brought on by his own misdeeds would be amusing.)
My feelings here are exactly the same as when the book “Primary Colors” came out. The author preferred not to reveal his identity. That means it’s NONE OF YOUR ####### BUSINESS. Somebody created a video of Trump pulling some WWF moves on a CNN avatar. And knowing who it is makes us better informed, exactly how?
Now if the Trump/WWF video threatened violence, that would be another matter, but who here seriously expects Drumpf to waltz into CNN and start body-slamming anchors? It was obvious satire.